How to Make an Open Plan Office Suck Less
mattblodgett.com
mattblodgett.com
The EU actually has strict rules about office space but companies seem keen to ignore them. My last employer had an office where it was always to cold or to warm, it stunk and was always noisy. Terrible place to work and I feel that this was reflected in the output of work.
All famous management books about managing programmers seem to agree with me on this yet it's still a trend. Terrible.
We have an open office setup because a) we're small enough that it's not an issue (6 people) and b) we can't afford the alternative. Offices are expensive, compared to the alternative.
I agree with the article about placement, but I strongly disagree with this constant sentiment that open offices suck. I agree that as we grow we'll need to be able to put space between people, and maybe the cost will become easier to tackle. But for a small company like ours, I find space division is just as often an annoyance as an issue.
It's not simply sentiment - studies consistently show that they "suck" because they lower productivity, increase stress, cause more sick days, and create higher amounts of worker dissatisfaction.
Nevertheless, as for your specific circumstance I fully agree an open office is the most appropriate solution - generally speaking when people discuss open office layouts they're not talking about five or six person startups.
Put 100 other people there, and you'll get an open plan office.
[1] Unless you have talkative positions (like sales), and highly intellectual positions sharing that room - if that's the case, you'd better separate them
That's not an open office. In the discussion of alternatives to open offices, having each team (3-8 people all doing the same thing) in their own office is frequently brought up. This isn't considered an open plan; it's just a sensible design for collaboration.
Let me boil down what people are really talking about when they talk about an open office: picture a space where the people doing creative work, the people talking on phones, and the people taking a coffee break are stuck being physically proximate for eight hours per day. Picture all their desks faced so a manager (also sat in the same room) can see their screens, though they can't see his.
Is there any way to find non-open-office environments? If there was a list of companies without open offices, I'd apply to every one on the list.
I'm definining "not an open office" as either offices for everyone (best) or team rooms of <4 people. Even cubicles would be an improvement. (and you know things are bad when cubicles seem like a luxurious environment)
Also, FogCreek/StackExchange has private offices http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/01/why-we-still-believe-i...
They're the only example I know about, a business that has private offices and publishes articles about how awesome it is.
I'm starting to think that the only way I'll ever get my own office is to bootstrap my own business.
My point isn't that open offices are better. But some people clearly prefer them, and I think this community would benefit from a more nuanced discussion about when an open office is better vs. when private rooms are better.
This article takes a step in that direction by pointing out that some open layouts are better than others, but the author also makes it pretty clear that he never thinks an open office is a good thing. The world is rarely so black and white.
It also seems likely to me that open offices are more likely to be poorly executed than private rooms (there's a lot more rope to hang yourself with). That's all the more reason for us to have more nuanced discussions about it.
As an example, most people on HN are singularly focused on what makes for a good office for programmers. My startup is made up mostly of non-programmers, and all programmers are allowed to work remotely. So basically, my goals might not be the same as yours, and one-size-fits-all advice is too simplistic.
Another example: In our office everyone's primary desk is in the open workspace, but we also have enough private rooms that 100% of our team can work from those at the same time if they want. So no one has to work from the open office, and yet most people choose to. I'd guess that open offices are viewed much more favorably when they're not the only option.
To make this claim convincing you're going to have to come up with some data. For developers, the data show clearly open offices are productivity killers. Some people may like them, but that doesn't make those people more productive.
So what are the areas where open offices plausibly improve business function?
Employee retention? This is possible, as some people clearly have a preference for them, but based on comments in this and other threads the people who hate them hate the a lot, while the people who like them aren't nearly so zealous.
Productivity? The data show this is clearly not the case.
"Communication"? I put this in quotes because I'm not sure what it means, although it gets touted as a benefit of open offices. Private offices and short meetings with small numbers of people result in good communications within and across teams, and I'm not sure what barrier to communication is imposed by being unable to interrupt the person three desks over (and distract everyone in between) that can't be solved by a simple messenger app.
Scalability? Almost by definition open offices don't scale. Maybe opponents of open offices should start hitting on this idea hard: "Your architecture scales, why doesn't your workplace?"
I've also read (I can't find the source) that one of the issues with open offices is the less personified work space. The decorations at your desk, the photos on the short walls of your cube, your chair settings all make you feel more at home. The more "open" your office is you lose this.
Your anecdote could lead the conclusion that you drew, but I'm not sure that it does.
There's also plenty of people that clearly don't prefer them - but even for the ones that do studies have consistently shown that open office layouts are terrible for productivity. If the purpose of a workplace is to be a place where people work something that increases productivity probably shouldn't be so easily dismissed.
It's like when you ask a child if she'd like to share toys with her cousins. She's expected to say yes, and if she does say no, the parents will remind her she's supposed to be nice and share. So it's not really a choice, it's an appearance of choice.
At my workplace, management is in love with open offices. The HR director spoke in glowing terms about another division of the company, where the entire workplace is one great big open office from end to end. The managers all agree that the open office improves "collaboration."
A danger to watch out for is that all management initiatives are successful by default. The open offices have been declared to be a success.
My desk is a face-to-face next to a hallway. I get interrupted every few minutes by people looking for my colleagues: "Is Alice in today? What time does she usually come in?" "Do you know where Bob hides?" "Is Cathy still in her meeting?" If somebody comes to ask me a question, my face-to-face colleague joins the conversation and dominates it.
Something that's helped me a lot is Portable Apps. I can have all of my apps and data on a pocket size hard drive, walk out of my office, plug it into any computer anywhere, and get to work.
On the matter of open offices being a pre-declared success, I think they are also a bit of a j-curve or "google brain" phenomenon where leaving the open office environment becomes a stressful proposition. Junior workers stay more dependent and become afraid of not having a source of immediate answers that really holds them back from proper growth and self confidence.
Across that experience, the most intelligent and productive coworkers I've encountered have also been those who prefer a private workspace and the ability to selectively focus without undue interruptions.
They -- we -- are not anti-social people. Many are also some of the most effective in professional interaction. That includes coming to meetings prepared and being able to define problems and solutions in e.g. half the scheduled meeting time. It includes being able to independently assess and prioritize requests, including being flexible enough to do now what needs to be done, sometimes at the drop of a hat, while also putting off some of the "how do I...?" interruptions in a fashion that quitely prompts people to do their own reading and research of readily available materials before interrupting others' workflow.
Those who have professed a preference for open space plans, including e.g. one of our moves from offices to cubettes (not even enough walls to be a real cubicle)? Well, in large part, those have been the people in endless meetings and constantly "communicating", but whose actual thinking and work I and others like me are constantly correcting.
Maybe that sounds arrogant. But it's true. When you repeatedly receive completed work and find large holes in it within the first five minutes of your attention, something is wrong...
This is just anecdote. But, for me, it spans multiple decades at multiple locations and large number of professional relationships.
Anyone who says this is a black and white issue and science has revealed the truth has somehow overlooked the long history of failed attempts at trying to measure productivity of software development teams (Most of which confuse activity with progress).
There's quite a lot more to programming than how many hours of uninterrupted typing you have.
I'm a programmer and when I do visual type work, e.g. HTML/CSS I don't mind sitting in an open space. I can easily concentrate on what I'm doing.
However, when I'm doing algorithmic type work and I need to juggle ten different problems in short term memory I certainly want peace and quiet so I can concentrate.
Many companies can easily solve the problem by have a "loud" and "quiet" space, but most companies simply choose not to.
I think it's a case of peer pressure. Nobody wants to be seen as the anti-team-spirit guy who wants to work in their office alone. But deep in their heart I bet all of them wanted a private office.
My current job, when I started I shared a largish office with one other girl. This was perfect in my opinion. If we wanted to be social, we could speak to each other. If we wanted to get on with work we could. Now the organization has grown and we are 4 squeezed into the same office. The space isn't the issue, its when people come in to discuss things. One person in the office is involved in the conversation, but it ends up affecting everyone sitting there.
During my last trip to Westfield mall in San Francisco I noticed the new Bespoke coworking office space.
My inner thoughts trended on the same observations as the OP has stated. The Bespoke designers created a coworking office space that shuffles 12 or more folks at a single table, allocates window views that are accessible by mall patrons, and limits soundproofing to user brought headphones.
The only upside is for the commercial investors: be trendy to attract startups who are more than willing to spend big bucks on attractive, temporary office space. Productivity be damned.
I work in a private office currently but am not opposed to working in an open plan office. However, if you violate simple rules like seating me so close to a co-worker that I can see every move, smell every smell and engage in afternoon game of footsies, or if you seat me with my back to a high traffic area, my productivity and satisfaction with my environment are going to suffer greatly.
Office leases are written in terms of dollars per square foot. Fewer square feet = Fewer dollars. Yes there's all this nonsense about "increasing communication" and so on. Bullshit. It's cheaper, end of story.
They really are just being cheap on office space, but they justify it with some nonsense excuse about how they are more productive environments.
If proper offices make workers 10%-20% more productive, it would obviously be worth it, because the office space expense is still small compared to salary and other overhead.
True, but I don't think the ~$10K a year[1] they're saving (per dev) outweighs the productivity loss.
[1] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...
Really, I'm beginning to hold the belief that, for most companies, their highest possible ROI savings would be to just replace their entire programmer workforce with recent college grads, interns, low-bid contracts, or outsourced labor. They don't need anyone with higher skills than that for their junky glue-FOSS-to-do-CRUD problems; they just think they do.
I work in one right now as a sysadmin and I absolutely hate it. The very first image you see up there? The 8 desks just rammed against each other? I work in one of those.
I absolutely despise it to the point where I'm most often sitting in the server room at a table against a wall more than I'm at my own desk.
Employees with allergies, employees who use heavy scents (especially in combination with employees with allergies) and various food smells can all be problems even in cubicles.
Employees who sing, hum, and make other (often unconscious) sounds are likewise problematic in full distraction office layouts.
The claim that there is a cost savings is irrelevant, as "costs less" is never a justification for anything in business. What matters is productivity per dollar spent, so if you can hire four developers with private offices to do the work of five in an open plan, it's a wash.
People who run businesses based on cost savings and not productivity per dollar aren't the kind of people you want to work for if you can help it.